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Judith Ortiz Cofer (February 24, 1952 – December 30, 2016) was a Puerto Rican American author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the University's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.

Ortiz Cofer hailed from a family of story tellers and drew heavily from her personal experiences as a Puerto Rican American woman. In her work, Ortiz Cofer brings a poetic perspective to the intersection of memory and imagination. Writing in diverse genres, she investigated women issues, Latino culture, and the American South. Ortiz Cofer's work weaves together private life and public space through intimate portrayals of family relationships and rich descriptions of place. Her manuscripts and papers are currently housed at the University of Georgia's Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Judith Ortíz Cofer was born to Jesus Lugo Ortíz and Fanny Morot in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, on February 24, 1952. She moved to Paterson, New Jersey with her family in 1956. Morot gave birth to Judith Ortíz Cofer when she was fifteen years old. They believed they would have more opportunities for young parents in America. Despite Lugo’s passion for academia, he left school and joined the U.S. Army. He was stationed in Panama when his daughter was born. He met Judith Ortiz Cofer for the first time two years later. It is evident that her family’s move from Puerto Rico to New Jersey influenced her writing. Call Me Maria is a young adult novel that was published in 2004. It focuses on a teenage girl’s transition from Puerto Rico to New York City. They often made back-and-forth trips between Paterson and Hormigueros. Ortíz Cofer reflects on these trips in her memoir, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, stating they were disruptive to both her education and her social life. While she was primarily educated in Paterson, New Jersey, she attended local schools in Puerto Rico while she was there. While in Puerto Rico, Ortíz Cofer would stay in the home of her grandmother. Her transition between Puerto Rico and New Jersey greatly influenced her writing because she was able to contrast the two cultures. In 1967, when Ortíz Cofer was fifteen, her family moved to Augusta, Georgia, where she lived until her death in 2016. There, she attended Butler High School. Judith and her brother, Ronaldo, initially resisted the family's move South. Upon arriving in Georgia, however, Ortíz Cofer was struck by Augusta's vibrant colors and vegetation compared with the gray concrete and skies of city-life in Paterson.

Academic and literary career

Ortiz Cofer received a B.A. in English from Augusta College, and later an M.A. in English literature from Florida Atlantic University. Early in her writing career, Ortiz Cofer won fellowships from Oxford University and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which enabled her to begin developing her multi-genre body of work. Cofer was fluent in English and Spanish and worked as a bilingual teacher in the public schools of Palm Beach County, Florida, during the 1974-1975 school year. After she receiving her Master's degree and publishing her first collection of poems she became a lecturer in English at the University of Miami at Coral Gables. In 1984, Ortiz Cofer joined the faculty of the University of Georgia as the Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing. After 26 years of teaching undergraduate and graduate students, Ortiz Cofer retired from the University of Georgia in December 2013. Ortiz Cofer is best known for creative nonfiction works but she has worked in poetry, short fiction, children's books, and personal narrative. Cofer began her writing career with poetry, which she believed contained "the essence of language.” One of her earliest books was Peregrina (1986) which won the Riverstone International Chapbook Competition. She has received various awards such as grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Georgia Council for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for poetry, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Florida Fine Arts Council. In 2010 Ortiz Cofer was admitted to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Death

In July 2014, Ortiz Cofer was diagnosed with a rare type of liver cancer shortly after her retirement. She died on December 30, 2016, at her home in Jefferson County.

A memorial service was held at the University of Georgia Chapel on January 27, 2017, at 3 PM and followed by a reception at the Demosthenian Hall.

Judith Ortiz Cofer is buried in the Louisville City Cemetery.

Literary work

Ortiz Cofer's work can largely be classified as creative nonfiction. Her narrative self is strongly influenced by oral storytelling, which was inspired by her grandmother, an able storyteller in the tradition of teaching through storytelling among Puerto Rican women. Ortiz Cofer's autobiographical work often focuses on her attempts at negotiating her life between two cultures, American and Puerto Rican, and how this process informs her sensibilities as a writer. Her work also explores such subjects as racism and sexism in American culture, machismo and female empowerment in Puerto Rican culture, and the challenges diasporic immigrants face in a new culture. Among Ortiz Cofer's more well known essays are "The Story of My Body" and "The Myth of the Latin Woman," both reprinted in The Latin Deli.

A central theme Ortiz Cofer returns to again and again in her writing is language and the power of words to create and shape identities and worlds. Growing up, Ortiz Cofer's home language was Spanish. In school, she encountered English, which became her functional language and the language she wrote in. Early in her life, Ortiz Cofer realized her "main weapon in life was communication," and to survive, she would have to become fluent in the language spoken where she lived.

Ortiz Cofer believes that what it is important in life is not the event but the memory that these events produce. It was these memories that we as humans cling onto and our mind warp into how we would like to perceive these events. Ortiz Cofer tested her theory by asking both her mother and her brother to recall the same event. When both of them gave a different account of the same event, she came to the realization that a person’s memory of an event is based off many other factors, such as gender, race and even emotional situation. This phenomenon became the basis of her writing. Ortiz Cofer had written many different things within her time, such as personal essays, poems, and even novels. In each of her works, she stresses the fact that this is her own rendition of the truth and that everyone remembers an event differently. In her own words, she says, “If anyone objected I assured them that it wasn't my intent to defame them or warp the truth, but to give my rendition of it. My intent was poetic rather than genealogical.”

The Latin Deli

The Latin Deli is a collection of poetry, personal essays, and short fiction. These stories have one central subject, the Latinos who live within the United States. While these Latinos, while coming from different backgrounds, are all interconnected by their roots being embedded within through collective roots in Europe, Africa, and the New World. One of the major aspects of the work is that "the qualities uniformness and uniqueness are not mutually exclusive, and that the memories of the past and hopes for the future can be intertwined on a daily basis." Ortiz Cofer conveys this by using the lives of Puerto Ricans in a New Jersey barrio. This is directly parallel to her own upbringing in the United States.

List of works

Multi-genre works

• The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry (1993), U of Georgia Press, ISBN 978-0820315560. Second edition: (2010), University of Georgia Press, ISBN 9780820336213
• The Year of Our Revolution: New and Selected Stories and Poems (1998), Arte Publico Press, ISBN 1558852247
• Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990)
• American History (1993)

Poetry

• A Love Story Beginning in Spanish (2005), University of Georgia Press, ISBN 0820327425
• Reaching for the Mainland and Selected New Poems (1995), Bilingual Press, ISBN 092753455X
• Terms of Survival (1987), Arte Publico Press, ISBN 1558850791

Prose

• The Line of the Sun (1989), University of Georgia Press, ISBN 0820313351

Works on writing

• Lessons from a Writer’s Life: Readings and Resources for Teachers and Students (2011), co-authored by Harvey Daniels, Penny Kittle, Carol Jago, and Judith Ortiz Cofer, Heinemann, ISBN 0325031460
• Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming A Writer (2000), University of Georgia Press, ISBN 0820322423
• Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (1999), editor Marilyn Kallet, University of Georgia Press, ISBN 0820321532
• Conversations with the World: American Women Poets and Their Work (1998), contributor Toi Derricotte, Trilogy Books, ISBN 0962387991

Pamphlets

• The Native Dancer (1995), ASIN: B00I6G9STO
• Peregrina (1986), Poets of the Foothills Art Center, Riverstone Press, ISBN 0936600063
• Latin Women Pray (1980), The Florida Arts Gazette Press, ASIN: B008A2A5GY

Contributions

• Triple Crown: Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American Poetry (1997), Bilingual Press, ISBN 0916950719
• The Mercury Reader, A Custom Publication (2005), Pearson Custom Publishing, ISBN 053699840X
• Quixote Quarterly, Summer 1994 (Vol. 1, No. 1), Chuck Eisman, ISBN 0964219808
• The Kenyon Review, Summer / Fall 1998 (Vol. 20, No. 3/4). Kenyon College, ASIN: B001NODMH0

See also

• "The Myth of the Latin Woman"
• List of Puerto Rican writers
• List of Famous Puerto Ricans
• Puerto Rican literature

External links

• New Georgia Encyclopedia article on Judith Ortiz Cofer
• Judith Ortiz Cofer's website at the University of Georgia

Category:1952 births Category:2016 deaths Category:People from Hormigueros, Puerto Rico Category:University of Georgia faculty Category:Augusta State University alumni Category:Florida Atlantic University alumni Category:20th-century American novelists Category:Hispanic and Latino American novelists Category:21st-century American novelists Category:American young adult novelists Category:American autobiographers Category:American women short story writers Category:American women poets Category:Hispanic and Latino American autobiographers Category:American women essayists Category:Women autobiographers Category:American women novelists Category:20th-century American women writers Category:21st-century American women writers Category:20th-century American poets Category:21st-century American poets Category:Puerto Rican women writers Category:Women writers of young adult literature Category:20th-century American short story writers Category:21st-century American short story writers Category:20th-century American essayists Category:21st-century American essayists Category:Puerto Rican novelists Category:Puerto Rican short story writers Category:Puerto Rican poets Category:Puerto Rican non-fiction writers Category:Novelists from Georgia (U.S. state)